An AI recently asked me: “What’s a controversial belief you hold?”
My answer was this: There is nothing special about human creativity. We just apply what we’ve already seen and know. It’s all just pattern recognition and application. A machine can do it just as well.
Let me explain: Imagine you’re a caveman or cavewoman in the Stone Age and your partner just asked you for a new dinner table. This being the Stone Age, named after its concrete lack of Swedish furniture stores, the table your partner desires is of course made of stone - around half a ton of it. So you mumble something about “high maintenance” and you get to work, making one of the fundamental discoveries of humankind: the wheel! In a stroke of genius, you somehow wiggle the boulder on top of some logs you cut and roll the whole thing into your cave. Partner happy. Day saved!
But was it really a stroke of genius that let you discover the wheel? I say no. I believe there is no godly spark that can’t be reproduced outside a human brain. I think caveman-you most likely saw things rolling before: Some frolicking mammoth kicked a stone loose and it tumbled down a hill. A dung beetle rolling home his little breakfast ball of… well, dung. So you already know that things can roll and that rounder things roll better than square ones. You also know that when you stack things on top of each other, sometimes their properties affect the things above: If you place some dry twigs on the wet cave floor, it becomes a dry place to sit (or you get wet if placed on top of the twigs if you didn’t use enough of them). Combining these two patterns that you already observed, you place the dinner table boulder on top of the logs to have the logs’ “rolling” property extend to the rock. Pattern application.
Okay, maybe this is true for technical inventions with some sort of utility, but what about art? Surely that kind of creativity can’t be replicated? I hear you. So let’s imagine you’re Jackson Pollock, happily throwing paint at a canvas. You know paint. You know it sticks to things when you throw it. You know that art is conveniently displayed on canvases. Pattern recognition. So you combine both concepts and throw paint at canvases: pattern application. But there has to be something missing, right? A simple paint-thrower robot cannot reproduce a Pollock painting.
That was the AI’s next question for me: “What’s the sliver that’s left? What, if anything, do you think humans can do that LLMs genuinely can’t?”
I think the missing part is feeling. Being able to feel. Having emotions. Pollock-you will look at the canvas and have some feeling about the splatter. If it feels right Pollock-you stops, the painting is done. Until then: throw some more paint.
